AI system automates coding for scientific research
Peer-Reviewed Publication
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 4-Jun-2026 15:16 ET (4-Jun-2026 19:16 GMT/UTC)
A new AI tool called Empirical Research Assistance (ERA) can automatically write high-performance scientific software and could significantly accelerate scientific discovery across many domains.
A University of Florida engineering professor says commercially available tools used to detect AI-generated text in scientific literature are ineffective.
Three faculty researchers from The University of Texas at San Antonio were celebrated with the inaugural Texas Innovation Award, a new statewide award recognizing leadership in translating academic research into real-world impact.
A phase 2 clinical trial showed burosumab, a targeted antibody therapy, safely restored phosphate balance in children and adults with fibrous dysplasia, a rare bone disorder associated with fractures and deformities. The therapy reduced abnormal bone turnover markers and improved mobility in severely affected children, including independent walking after full-time wheelchair use. The findings suggest that inhibition of fibroblast growth factor-23 may help reduce disability and improve physical function in patients with phosphate-wasting skeletal disease.
Achieving in situ dynamic tracking of neurotransmitters in the complex intestinal lumen remains a major technical challenge in gastroenterology and biosensing. The research team developed a general sensing architecture that integrates a one-dimensional nanoconductive network with supramolecular host-guest recognition, and on this basis constructed a stretchable electrochemical sensing platform. This platform offers a systematic solution to three key obstacles in the in situ detection of small molecules in the gut lumen: adaptation to mechanical deformation, suppression of biofouling, and selective recognition of structurally similar molecules. Using this framework, the team revealed for the first time the central role of enterochromaffin cells (ECs) in immune-mechanical signal integration by electrochemical strategy. Under stimulation by microbial mimetics and their metabolites, ECs integrate multiple external signals and reset their response threshold through dual regulation: enhancing neurotransmitter synthesis and storage while increasing sensitivity to mechanical stimulation.
The significance of this study lies not only in validating sensing performance in the intestinal setting, but also in proposing a practical strategy to address a long-standing and widely shared challenge in in vivo electrochemical monitoring. More importantly, by emphasizing the coordinated design of sensing material structure and function, this work moves beyond optimizing a single performance metric in stretchable devices and instead establishes a systematic framework for accurate chemical information acquisition in complex mechanical and biochemical environments. Although the intestinal lumen serves here as a particularly challenging validation scenario, the underlying design principles are expected to be applicable to other in vivo monitoring systems.
Researchers have successfully engineered an L-amino acid deaminase to overcome substrate inhibition, a major bottleneck in the biocatalytic production of phenylpyruvic acid. The study demonstrates an approximately 17-fold improvement in productivity at high substrate concentrations through strategic modification of the enzyme’s binding pocket.
New research from Singapore University of Technology and Design and the Singapore-ETH Centre finds that private cooling may protect people from heat while reducing the perceived urgency of broader urban climate solutions — a pattern the researchers call “behavioural insulation”.